Pressman attended Harvard Law School with Alger Hiss, and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review,[2] later joining (together with Hiss)[3] the International Juridical Association (IJA), which "consistently followed the Communist Party line."[4]

In 1933, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace appointed Pressman assistant general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Pressman subsequently recruited Hiss and Nathan Witt into that office.[5] AAA administrator George Peek resigned in protest, writing, that "in the legal division were formed the plans which eventually turned the AAA from a device to aid the farmers into a device to introduce the collectivist system of agriculture into this country."[6]

Pressman would eventually testify that he had at the time been a member of the Ware group, an underground group of Communists in the Federal government.[7]Pressman would also corroborate Whittaker Chambers' identification of Witt, John Abt and Charles Kramer as members of this Communist cell[8] and admit under oath that he recognized Chambers.[9]

In the 1930's Pressman was also a member of the Ware group, a group of American citizens employed in the United States government who considered Marxist ideologies a solution to the Great Depression, while secretly working for Soviet intelligence. As communists, Pressman and the members of the group were pledged to the violent overthrow of the United States government. In 1950 Pressman admitted to having been a secret member in 1934-35 and an ideological ally thereafter.

↑ Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, United States Congress, Espionage in the U.S. Government: Hearings under Public Law 601 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1948), p. 643 (PDF p. 153)